NPCs: What Are They, Even?

As an avid gamer the part I had cultural trouble with was the taking notes in the first place.

In comp.sci we had good notes from the lecturer, and when we didn’t they had a book to sell and I dropped the course. and anyway you just do the maths and you learn it, no need for notes. Humanities subjects are weird.

This sounds like a good time to say I enjoyed reading that, and I’m sorry to learn the context. (I liked the original point about NPCs too, but I stayed away from the comments because watching men derail conversations about feminism drains the joy from my world.)

One thing that’s maybe worth bearing in mind is that not all NPCs are created equal.

As in, for some role playing games (I’m thinking Baldur’s Gate/Bioware type of games) the player (often) ends up spending a lot of time attending to the needs of the NPC(s). Sorting out feuds, paying debts, solving family problems and romancing them. Not all NPCs, for sure, and the player gets to choose which, but it would be weird to play those games and *not* spend a lot of time servicing the needs of your favourite NPCs.

I play a lot of videogames but I also run tabletop roleplaying games, and one thing I find interesting is that some people want to treat NPCs as things even when the NPCs are being played by a human being and not a set of coded scripts. Perhaps more interestingly, this was a problem long before videogames had complex scripted NPCs. My guess is that this has less to do with the NPCs directly and more to do with the way games position players as the most important people in the world. (And it’s the same in the wider world, of course.)

Sam: yeah, the post is very computer-game-centric. It’s a hallmark of a good DM that D&D-style NPCs do *not* act as mere enablers, even if that’s their game function. The whole round/flat-characters thing. Adding a few extra brushstrokes to their characterizations makes all the difference.

as a parent (you) or as a crotchety oldster who laments the decline of decency, standards, and civilization (me), do you ever worry that the gaming experience is habituating gamers to treat real people as NPCs?

Before we had NPCs in the game of life, we had spear-carriers in the opera of life. The problem of treating other people as means and not as ends themselves has been with us since prehistory. Only the metaphors change.

Hm, I think it largely depends on the GM and the other members of the group. If they’re into powergaming, or playing “evil” or immoral characters anyway, than such a treatment can be quite common. But if you have an experienced GM, he’ll see to it, that your behavior comes back at you one time or the other. And even the other Players can see to that. If you have some well played characters in the group who have a modicum of morals, they will hold the other character accountable for that, too. Priests/Paladins are always good on that.

Engels@15–

I was not quoting Pinker, and I was not referring to any world-wide, millennia-long changes.

I’m referring to crime-stats in the US and other wealthy countries over the last few decades in which video-games have been available for playing. All violent crimes in the US are down over the relevant period. (Kevin Drum makes an interesting case that it is driven be lower lead-contamination, but whatever the cause is, the numbers are clear).

I think you’re misinformed about Pinker’s grander thesis, as well, but that’s a squabble for another thread.

Interestingly, one of the big places popular feminist media criticism has fallen on its face is in dealing with the idea of an NPC. There are videos in which a certain popular feminist (whom I will not name for fear of unleashing The Hordes of Gamers upon me) struggles with the idea that NPCs are inherently objectifying, because they exist to be acted upon as objects. But it seems more rational to say that NPCs literally are inherently objects, because, uh, they literally ARE objects. Just objects fashioned to look like men or women or squid people or whatever. The differences between the idea of “treating people like objects” and “treating objects like people” is an interesting one, but not one that many seemed to have really wrapped their head around yet.

22: that is a weak criticism. Characters in realist novels are all “objects,” created by their author. Yet it’s a valid criticism if a novel’s characters are unrealistic and there just to gratify the reader’s prejudices. Same w games.

The differences between the idea of “treating people like objects” and “treating objects like people” is an interesting one, but not one that many seemed to have really wrapped their head around yet.

Still looking thru my notes to see what, if anything, to paste.

Vivian Sobchak was a pioneer: Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Haraway. LaMarre.

I think this is Sharalyn Orbaugh:

“Practices of cultivating an attachment for the unreal while inhabit-
ing a different everyday reality harken to far earlier times. In fact, this
stance has been entrusted to young men for generations. In an earlier
era, the scientific imagination, detached from mainstream reality, was
a symbol of masculinity.In addition, I describe later how youth were
redefined as possessing powers of imagination that exceed the confines
of reality”

Honey don’t just stand there lookin like this dream will never end
Let me introduce you to my 2D waifu.

Anderson & FS: But this is what’s interesting. Even in a social game where the NPCs are visibly human you still get That Guy (and it’s always been a guy in my experience) who thinks being a protagonist means the world is his playground. There are ways to mitigate and discourage that kind of behaviour, of course, but it’s surprisingly hard work.

And, in another parallel with sexism, problem players tend to push at the boundaries of what’s acceptable, trusting that everyone else would rather put up with a certain amount of bad behaviour than derail the game.

(Also, what rhea@14 said.)

“certainly true that it’s quite sensible to treat NPCs regardless of stipulated gender like useful tools, because they are useful tools.”

This suggests something about the ethics of gaming that’s more insidious than gratuitously bloody violence.

I’m assuming engels is trolling w/r/t ‘Americans are becoming more violent,’ but I’ll waste a few minutes of my life & reply anyway.

(1) If you adjust for inflation, it looks like (surprise!) US defense spending went up under GW Bush, down under Clinton, up under GHW Bush, and down under Obama. Which implies, quite obviously, that military spending (and war) is in large part an outcome based on the ideological preferences of the person occupying the White House … and irrelevant to the underlying level of preference for violence among the American people.

(2) The federal prison population is finally starting to drop. Using the years 1980 to present ignores this. If you take into account the growing population, the recent drop is more remarkable. In any case, since an increasing percentage of the prison population has been nonviolent offenders since 1980, using prison population as a metric for violence seems rather misguided.

(Sorry for replying to the threadjack.)

Also sorry for failing to use the ‘href’ marker correctly …

On the actual topic: one could argue that our tendency to treat others as NPC’s is, like, the fundamental problem of morality. I think Kant rather did say that, in fact. But it’s lovely to have a less clunky way than Kant’s of making the point! (I fear that telling Belle her prose is less clunky than Kant’s may be the ultimate damning with faint praise, and I apologize for that as well as all my other failures of this morning.)

NPC is not just a fabulous metaphor for sexism, it’s also about:

— racism (obviously);
— homophobia (the thought being something like: “if gays are fully human then I might be able to understand their experience, and then I’m only 1/2 step from being gay myself”);
— the standard American attitude toward people in other countries;
— road rage (those other drivers aren’t fully human);
etc.

Hate her! Not you! I suck so bad at mobile! I forgot where I was in a sentence. I’m really sorry.

Too old to be a gamer (in fact my 30+ y.o. oldest child just barely snuck in under the line) so I’ll play the role of crotchety oldster, but I’m going to do it in a pseudo-intellectual way, consistent with an intellectual fashion of my youth. It looks to me as though video-games, esp. those with NPCs, encourage not only violence but narcissism more broadly. Also (alluding to the previous post which we are not supposed to address directly), it seems as though sexist behavior (in contrast, perhaps, with sexist ideology or practice) has strong links between narcissism and sexism.

Like many of my ideas, I suspect that this is not original, but I don’t recall (I did say “oldster!) running across this anywhere. Or rather, like many of my ideas that are good and original, what is good is not original and what is original … Have these issues been discussed (in interesting ways) elsewhere?

Murc–the Weighted Companion Cube story is really fascinating, and that’s exactly the kind of evidence that we need to get beyond the normal debate between people (like me) saying “video games coarsen the moral sentiments of their players and develop habits of anti-social narcissistic exploitation of others, contrary to the Categorical Imperative!!”, and the other side saying “It’s a GAME, dude, so CHILL! Players can tell they are in a game, and they can tell when they are not, and they know enough not to treat real people IRL the way they treat pixels on a screen. The crude habituation story–what you practice in one context you will do in others–does not work when the one context features mere daubs of digital paint and the other involves living humans. Also, stop spoiling our fun!”

What your story shows us is that there are really complex reactions and engagements with digital daubs of paint, if they are given certain signs, stories, and symbolic weight. Gamers *are* interacting with them as though they were somewhat person-like–witness the gamers’ reluctance to throw the WCC into an incinerator at the end.

I just wish there were a lot more research and a lot more evidence for all of this, so that it didn’t always sound like warmed-over Aristotle meets warmed-over Ayn Rand.

I’m not sure what’s more disturbing, the belief that keeping millions of people in cages isn’t violent or that it doesn’t count if ‘they deserved it’. Discuss with reference to Immanuel Kant.

The idea that the persistent huge scale of US military spending has nothing to do with preferences of American voters is laughable.

I was, I believe, 17 or 18 when, walking down the street, it occurred to me that all those other people going about their business viewed it as as important as I viewed mine.

I did computer/Internet tech support for a long, long time, and pretty much all of my coworkers were gamers. I never was. Never cared to be. Well, aside from computer chess and Risk.

But from their descriptions of their gaming experiences, media depictions and your explication above, it’s not too difficult to see that NPCs can be, but are not always, a spinoff of previous “helpmates” and/or disposable parts. A combo/spinoff, perhaps going back to ancient myths where the hero is helped along his way by various NPCs or goddesses acting as NPCs. Athena and Perseus spring quickly to mind.

One of the paths toward the gamer version — it seems obvious — would be our movies and our dramas, especially those set in wars or violent crime dramas, etc. etc. How many NPCs are killed by the “heroes” and villains along the way, and aren’t we programmed not to feel a thing about their deaths? They’re just extraneous characters, and barely that.

Media, of course, aren’t the only modes of teaching us not to care about 99% of the population. But they’re perhaps the most effective. From studies done on very small children we know they’re not born this way. We know that they have an equality bias early on, one that is pretty much beaten out of them over time. It’s also no wonder that we lose this, given the way our economic system organizes us and is organized, hierarchically. An anti-egalitarian, autocratic society is very, very likely to produce people who don’t give a shit about many people beyond those who write their checks, a few family members and friends.

In short, we’ve had at least two very concentrated centuries leading us here, with the disease accelerating from the Industrial Revolution on. It’s not surprising at all that we treat people as means to an end. The culture teaches this, 24/7.

Does free will exist? The playing characters are also massively constrained by the mores, taboos, and folkways of the preconstructed game field. Murder those Aliens!!! Not unlike real life. Others may be more “successful” but the arc of my personal game resembles a search for a place where the things I am constrained to do are reasonable, kind, and generous. Also rewarding, if possible.

Well, one of the criticisms of the well known feminist game critic is that while she has something of a point, she is somewhat selective in evidencing it. You might say this doesn’t matter, since if the evidence of sexism (or unfortunate gender tropes) is there, then it’s there.

That has something going for it, but NPCs are treated badly, and it can be a stretch to claim that because some of them are female that this is evidence of sexism.

I’ve even heard it claimed that this is already having an unfortunate effect. Bioware (who are my favourite games company) are known for strongly written NPCs with personality, romances, sex appeal etc. It’s not porn, but does touch those themes. In their latest game, they have been careful not to oversexualise the female NPCs. Which perhaps sounds fine. But they have no such restrictions for the men.

In short, they write their men to be interesting and their women to be inoffensive. And that’s what they got, whereas in previous games their women were at least as interesting as the men. I fear this is the kind of reaction you get with selective evidencing. I’m all for more diversity, more female protagonists, less female victims and so on – but if the darker roles for NPCs (eg the vast majority of NPC victims are male, with the women used as shock value.) are off limits for women, then you end up creating exactly the kind of space that discourages diversity.

Just a last non point. Given that most NPCs are male (some are inanimate of course) does that effect the sexism as treating people like NPCs at all? Genuine question.

Thanks to Murc for the “Weighted Companion Cube” story, that’s fascinating.

It’s a hallmark of a good DM that D&D-style NPCs do *not* act as mere enablers, even if that’s their game function.

Hmmm, this immediately made me think of the (brilliant) gaming comic strip nodwick which presents AD & D style adventures from the point of view of the henchmen (Nodwick) who’s job is to carry the loot that the party acquires. For example, from the wikipedia description:

Artax and Yeagar frequently use Nodwick to set off traps, or to distract or bait monsters. Nodwick has died numerous times, but each time Piffany manages to revive him with her duct tape of healing, usually wrapping him from head to toe to put him back together (On one occasion, Nodwick was reduced to a pile of ashes, so the group poured his ashes into a “Hench Mold” with the words “Just add water” written on it; about the only time she hasn’t used the duct tape); so Yeagar and Artax usually don’t worry about tossing him into gruesome traps, feeding him to dragons, etc., if it will advance their quests. . . .

Prior to this conversation I wouldn’t have thought about the way in which it could be read a commentary on sexism, but it works that way. Though nodwick is male we often see him being dismissed by the male adventurers (Yeagar and Artax) in the way that parallels the experiences of women.

Gah Ross = RPGs. Damn autocorrect.

I like the “-ist treatment of real people in real life is similar to how one treats NPCs in video games” idea.

Let’s play with it some more. Seems to me NPCs in virtual reality (VR) reflect RL (“Real Life”) experience in many ways. Actually, VRs reflect RL in many ways!

E.g. 1- I’m sitting here looking out my window on a view of the area, and I can see little cars driving along the freeway and I’m sure there are people in them and they mean about as much to me as most NPCs.

E.g. 2- I remember seeing/reading reports from the war in Iraq. “X thousand troops killed or wounded” but no one bothered to report the tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people killed or wounded or displaced.

E.g. 3- I hear about someone I don’t know dying and think that’s sad (if I think anything at all). I call the vet to come euthanize my dog and I’m inconsolable. Is my experience reflected in the WC Cube story in some way?

I’m an oldster too, but I tend to think the awful parts of a lot of VR games come straight from RL with only a little cosmetic tweaking. And the good/fun parts too!

From this point of view maybe RL people/VR NPCs are more than just analogous? I.e. the way we treat/think about NPCs is a very close reflection on how we treat people in RL.

Well, if you’ve read this far, thanks for sticking with me as I splash about in the shallows.

I actually didn’t read the comments on the other post, and didn’t read it at all until this one referenced it, so I was unaware of the amount of history here. Sorry for reminding you of it Belle!

I feel I should contribute something to the important subject of NPCs to make amends.

@53
The female characters in DragonAge:Inquisition didn’t strike me as very inoffensive. I mean Sera must be the most offensive person in the entire game! Both to the other characters and to the player having to put up with her.

But then I suppose the companions aren’t quite true npcs, they’re too fleshed out and meaningful. Same goes for Pillars of Eternity. The companions are extremely well written, male or female, but as in any work of linear fiction you have characters with detail and ones left as functional stereotypes. Barkeepers selling you a bed and exclaiming about how clean their inn is don’t need to do more than the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, and narratively I think there’s a strong argument for them doing little so as to focus on the story.

Leaving narrative and looking at the gameplay side what little substance there is vanishes. Even companions stand around waiting for you to trigger their excellent characterful writing, with a big gamey speech bubble if they have something “new” to say. The NPC has to stay out of the way of the game, and very few games base their fun on interacting with NPCs. One exception that this audience may be less aware of is SpyParty (http://www.spyparty.com/), the player has to pretend to be an NPC and fool the second player. Or he gets sniped.

The technology for this kind of thing is quite hard to make so there aren’t many examples of making believable behaviour a core mechanic in a game. I hope we see more as the tools for making games improve, and they are improving at a near exponential rate.

However if I was feeling misanthropic I might suggest technology isn’t the sole barrier people sometimes think. NPCs behave in the predictable, shallow way they do because that is what people expect. Not what gamers expect in games, what people expect. Every time a societal decision is reduced to profit/loss maths in the media it treats people as shallow NPCs. Entertainment is often based around the structure and “work” of a society and as ours is based on numerical transactions it shouldn’t be too surprising to see that duplicated.

Just this morning a clothing designer told me about meeting photographers in Los Angeles who were unfailingly warm and helpful until business was over, at which point you became invisible.

It HAS to be true of clerks: there’s immediate business in front of them to deal with. It’s more surprising and obvious in people you’ve shared names and work and opinions with in a two-person sit-down.

Clarification helped me, for what it’s worth.

Maybe like Janie M: I have nothing to say here except hello to Belle. Good to hear from you even if I have little idea or interest what this is all about. These games have left me cold since Mario, but that’s me.

I’m curious about the moral problem that people have with treating NPCs ‘badly’. I mean, we know that they don’t have feelings, but we still feel bad about it. When Lydia in Skyrim says (with just enough sarcasm that you know this is a multi-level in-joke) that she is “sworn to carry your burdens” every time you ask her to carry a valuable sword for you, you can’t help feeling slightly bad about it. And it’s not like I’m slacking here – I’m only asking her to carry the sword because I’m at my limit of carrying stuff, what with all the dragon bones and suits of Daedric armour. Plus she’s taller and stronger than I am!

Having said that, the entire point of first-person games is that they allow the player to be a hero. This is a privileged position. That is the entire point. Not everyone can win the 100m at the Olympics, or play Hamlet at the Globe, or be President of their local Bird-watching Society, never mind President of the United States. Games (at least, single-player games) allow everyone to be the hero, without inconveniencing another living soul. If you want to know what it feels like to be faster, stronger, more powerful than everyone else around you, there’s a game for that. (And also slower, weaker and less powerful; there are games for that too). The point being that you don’t need to cajole an entire cast of real people into creating this reality for you, which would be either oppressive or expensive or probably still both. Games allow you to play, and if we judge a person’s play by what it says about their character then we are destroying the most useful thing about it, that it allows you to put yourself in roles and scenarios that you would never encounter in real life, and behave differently to how you would normally.

This is why I’ve always been skeptical of the argument that “you are what you play”. I must have a body count totaling in the millions (OK, so this is mostly from playing a lot of Civilization, and much less from personally shooting people in the head in GTA) but I am otherwise an entirely non-violent and friendly person. The only thing I disagreed with Anita Sarkeesian about was when she claimed that experience of bad things (viz. sexism) in games is worse than in movies because the player is complicit in the act; this seemed to me to be an argument equivalent to saying that appearing as a sexist character in a play (or in an improv session) is morally bad and dangerous, which I don’t think most people would accept. I think it’s possible that treating NPCs badly in games might make us feel bad, we are perfectly entitled do it anyway, and this really isn’t harmful.

Stephenson-quoter kun,

“The only thing I disagreed with Anita Sarkeesian about was when she claimed that experience of bad things (viz. sexism) in games is worse than in movies because the player is complicit in the act”

I think there is a difference between watching a character act in a film and controlling the animated character in the game. If you are controlling the character you are acting to create the story you are simultaneously watching as it is a program — but if you are watching a film your action is confined to choosing to watch a film a director and actors etc have made.

“this seemed to me to be an argument equivalent to saying that appearing as a sexist character in a play (or in an improv session) is morally bad and dangerous, which I don’t think most people would accept.”

It would depend how the sexist character is portrayed in the play — if the sexism is celebrated then the actor’s choice to play the sexist character is encouraging sexism which unless you think sexism is good or neutral then you would have to agree is bad.

“I think it’s possible that treating NPCs badly in games might make us feel bad, we are perfectly entitled do it anyway, and this really isn’t harmful.”

Well computer games are animated so making the animation you control treat another animation badly is not harming a person but it might make you more likely to treat people badly in real life.

If you think about it the great numbers of people living in poverty in the world are treated as if they are NPCs as richer people spend money on luxuries. And also we are causing climate change and risking other planetary boundaries which is treating young people and future generations as NPCs.

While it may seem that doing something affects people more than watching it, the studies that have been done show that the interface differences in games distance the player from the events in the game more than in movies.

The active thought that the player must engage in means the fact it isn’t real is always present in their mind. In TV and film this doesn’t seem to be the case.

That said I don’t play GTA and I don’t feel I’m missing anything.

Belle, apology more than accepted. I’ve gain too much joy from reading your putdowns on this site and I was probably due some karmic retribution :)

To the extent that Sarkeesian is saying that games “reward” you for doing literally anything the game permits you to do, because experimenting and figuring out what happens when you try something is “fun” and “fun” is the reward a game gives, I think she’s almost 100% correct, particularly in the context of sandbox or puzzle games.

Where I get off the bus is her entire theory of human communication. Her videos treat meaning like it’s something that inherently exists in a work when that work is interpreted within a cultural context. As if meaning were like nutritional content. Given that you are a panda bear with a panda bear’s dietary needs, the nutritional value of this cheeseburger is such and such relative to your biology, and I am teaching you how to recognize this.

But meaning doesn’t work that way. The interpreter of a piece of media isn’t interpreting it wrong if he takes away something other than the meaning that would be placed on it by a purported plurality of his cultural cohort. We come to media with only that cultural baggage that has actually made it into our heads, and even that is diluted by the personal baggage we carry with us. Meaning is a varied issue even when a work remains fixed, and determining meaning is essentially an exercise in estimating how others think and feel. It’s essentially an empirical question.

In other words: A while back she argued that True Blood was questionable in its treatment of homosexuality, because it clearly created an analogy between the plight of it’s fictional vampires, and real life homosexual rights issues. She felt that this was problematic because it was analogizing homosexuals to bloodthirsty predatory monsters. And I can understand how that’s one possible interpretation of the story! But it’s certainly not the only interpretation. Just ask anyone who’s read Anne Rice or played Vampire the Masquerade or read any of the billions of “will they won’t they” female-aimed urban fantasy novels about Strong Female Protagonists and sexy werewolves and vampires (spoiler- they will). That fandom… the True Blood fandom… is liable to have a very different interpretation, and in fact are likely to see the analogy as a very flattering fantasy, and not insulting at all. You know, like how very few real life people wake up and go, “wait, X-Men analogizes gay rights to FILTHY MUTANTS! I AM SO ANGRY AT THIS INSULT!” Nobody who reads X-Men comics thinks that way.

So for me, Sarkeesian provides great insight into how some people see the world- a fact that I think is incredibly important for me to consider when I write things (you haven’t read anything I’ve written, I suck, this is why I have a day job). I just wish she was operating on a model that would concede the same thing to me.

But what do I know, I’m just some guy who always lets the guy’s wife through in Papers Please, and can think of no game more traumatic than Shelter. Obviously I’m just bad at media.

On Art and Morality, I think there is a genuine dynamic where Captain America is a good guy, and would never torture. And would get into gun-fights more days than not, but never kill (and hardly ever die).

One of those things is obviously unrealistic, an artifice of the story. Both being taken to be equally so gives you Gitmo.

Maybe there is a viable principle that it is a good thing to write true things. And if you have certain views, the things you think are true will match that. And there are other things, like vampires and orcs, that are clearly not true. So what you write about them means either nothing, or perhaps the opposite of the obvious meaning.

But it seems never a good idea to make anything about that process a concrete rule; defection is just too easy to gain anything from its enforcement.

Belle Waring,

In 2006 I had a psychotic episode the day after listening to Will Oldham’s Cursed Sleep EP and thinking it seemed to refer to me somehow. In the years afterwards listening to his music made me unwell and it seemed like it might somehow refer to me but I couldn’t be sure and would become unwell.

I emailed Will Oldham in late 2013 and due to events afterwards I was unwell a lot from July 2014-August 2015, I am now taking a higher amount of medication which is working okay at present.

I do not know what to do about this situation as I wrote to Will Oldham again in late 2014 but he wrote some replies then stopped when I wrote to his brother Ned Oldham who would not reply at all, and when I wrote to Drag City they were not very helpful either. This is very unfair I think and is very upsetting for me.

As I am on a high amount of medication now I can think about this for a longer period of time for the first time since 2006 so I can try to write my reasons down, but having to do this is upsetting too and it makes me angry as well and I also feel helpless.

Belle @80:

. The Sims is a gruesome survival horror game for some people, but it’s hilarious! In part because you are not doing what the game wants–it’s the breakiness that’s funny.

Yes, and the fact that they play the game ‘wrong’ shows that people who play games are much more interested in figuring out how the game works than they’re given credit for in the popular imagination.

Having said which, I think there is something to the notion that video games are an art form that is unique, precisely because it makes some choices available to you and not others. Could you nuke someone but then also make it off-planet in the end in Civ IV? No, right? The game The Sims tells you that you are playing it wrong when you engineer a death by drowning to your new family of Sims. It penalizes you. I think people playing GTAV are rewarded for making choices we normally regard as unmitigatedly bad, or valorizible only within the context of strained thought experiments (like when you need to carjack someone to get your daughter to the hospital in a place where no one can understand you but you know the roads well.)

In GTA, you are given incentives to do all kinds of terrible things, and if you want to progress in the game then you need to do them. What do we learn from this? That shooting and killing people is fun? Not really – we learn that incentives are very powerful, which is pretty much the standard left-liberal account of why crime and poverty go together. The game can help you understand ways in which incentives can override what we think of as being our normal moral or ethical principles. We don’t like to be confronted with the idea that, if placed under the same kinds of incentives ourselves, we might behave as these characters do, but games are a good way of understanding how we might react, and why other people for whom crime is a way of life behave as they do.

We get the same thing in more abstract strategy games too. One of my most uncanny experiences came from playing Rome: Total War. The strategy side of the game is a simple Civ-esque game of resource management – capture territory, construct buildings that improve the productive capacity of your lands, entertain the populace or train military units. Problem is, there’s a limit to the size or quantity of temples etc. that one can build to entertain the populace, but no limit on the size of population in a given territory. As the population grows, you need to maintain larger and larger garrisons in your cities to keep order, and this is both expensive and strategically unhelpful (you want those garrisons on the Rhine or in Persia or something, not suppressing riots in Spain). So the easiest thing to do is whack taxes all the way up, withdraw the garrison, and wait two turns for the inevitable revolt, then send in the army and massacre the local population (you’re given three options – occupy, enslave or exterminate; extermination subdues future rebellion most effectively). I figured this tactic out by following simple incentives – how to maintain an optimal balance of people to the resources necessary to keep them happy, whilst deploying my army toward the goal of imperial expansion – and ended up with a strategy of large-scale mass murder. The lesson here is not what fun it is to massacre people, but “oh, so that’s why imperialism is bad”, all the more visceral for the experience of the mechanisms at work.

As it happens, I went to a very interesting event last night which featured several discussions of video games, with different speakers classifying games as ‘art’, ‘design’ and – most interestingly for me – ‘thought experiment’ (yes, there was a discussion of the trolley problem). Jordan Erica Webber described games in terms of their ability to allow us to consider abstract moral problems that are difficult to approach as pure thought experiments and clearly unethical if done with real people; in a game we can see how certain combinations of incentives, moral frames and narratives act to produce different outcomes. This provides material for academic study (some games record and report back the player’s choices), but I think it’s interesting and useful just for individuals to study their own choices.

All of which leads me to the belief that exploring morally dubious scenarios in video games does not make a person any more likely to act out those scenarios in real life. For most people, the incentive structures which produce the behaviour in the game just aren’t there on a daily basis. To the extent that we do face such incentives in our lives, games can be a good way of understanding our own reactions to them. Should I ever be appointed World Emperor, I will be much more skeptical of my own motivations precisely because games have shown me how easily I can be manipulated by facts, figures and incentives. I’m not saying that anyone who runs for office should play SimCity first and disclose their results, but that’s only because I think the experience matters more than what score you got.

Apologies if this was already linked to — from The Guardian:

Anita Sarkeesian Interview

Sarkeesian, media critic and executive director of the nonprofit and video web series Feminist Frequency, has spent the past few years of her life at the centre of a firestorm in the gaming community – one that brings together misogyny, technology and a cultural shift in an industry so huge it now outperforms Hollywood. In videos that discuss misogyny in video games and widespread tropes that diminish women, Sarkeesian – named one of the 100 most influential people of 2015 by Time magazine – talks to the camera, with a commentary that runs the gamut from feminist theory to historical analysis. Her videos are smart, incisive and much needed in an industry in which women are often treated as little more than background decoration or damsels in distress.

Did you hear about the hitch-hiking robot that got vandalized at about the same time that Cecil the lion was killed and generated a raft of online commentary and dismay?

http://videos.theconference.se/kate-darling-robots-humans-and

At the risk of just flattering myself, and the further risk that most thoughts about one’s own mental states are not correct… does it come down to how comprehensive a theory of mind a person has? Apparently mine is overactive in that I identify even with fictions.

When I was a kid there were older twin brothers across the street who developed horrible elaborate ways to kill insects and slugs. It horrified me. But they always acted kind and loving to their pet dog, and they even cried when one of their teddy bears got “hurt.” Do some people just have empathy systems that are firing too infrequently — they sense pain/distress in things that look familiar but fail to sense it in the unfamiliar? So they’ll torture slugs but coddle stuffed animals, really connect with peers of the same sex but treat women like NPCs?

This has recalled another weird memory: I think I saw these same slug-torturing brothers engaged in a weird, abusive kind of sexualized play with a girl. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time until this thread. I think the boys were maybe twelve, which means I would have been 9, and they had a girl from their school over to play. We were in a free for all water fight outside in our bathing suits. One of the brothers discarded his squirt gun after a while and started just spraying the rest of us with the garden hose. After a while the other brother got the girl in a headlock and held her as the hose-wielding brother sprayed her relentlessly. Then the girl was wrestled to the ground and held as the hose sprayed continuously against her crotch for a minute or two. In my 9 year old mind it was just very odd, not horrible like the slug torture chambers. I mean surely if the girl hated it she would have screamed and cried and tried to bite… thought 9 year old me. Instead she just tried to wriggle out of it and kept laughing loudly. But I don’t remember her coming over to play again.

What’s interesting to me about Grand Theft Auto games is that the growing gap between gameplay and story experience. The gameplay remains as antisocial as ever; you drive around (fantastic) environments, and while you don’t have to cause mayhem, it’s highly encouraged and rewarded–you pretty much have to steal cars to get anywhere, and the pedestrians and other drivers seem programmed to infuriate you into running them down when they get in your way. Like why is that person stopping for a red light when you want to drive 100 mph through the intersection??

It’s not very socially redeeming, but I wonder if it’s useless. Is it helpful or harmful to be able to explore sociopathy and violence in a basically consequence-free environment? Maybe both?

But anyway, the stories themselves seem designed to punish you for enjoying the sociopathy that they serve up for your enjoyment. The game is peppered with ‘jokes’ about gamers being antisocial losers; the protagonists are deliberately humorless and unlikable, and all of their victories in their criminal enterprises are hollow; they learn nothing and lose much. And sometimes the people who make the game seem to take sadistic pleasure in making the player uncomfortable. In one series entry, a necessary quest requires you to torture one innocent middle-eastern man and murder another on behalf of the government; since you’re required to actually play through these events, not just witness them in cutscenes.

I like the analogy. I think that maybe the GTA makers are more aware of this phenomenon of treating other people like NPCs. Because anybody who drives totally does this sometimes–we reduce all the other human beings to just cars, obstacles in the road.

Stephenson quoter-kun @78 So we can’t have art that portrays bad things, unless those bad things are accompanied with a clear moral message to tell people how to feel about it?

But I wonder how many of us have actually seen art/media that portrays bad things front-and-center without moral commentary? It’s so natural for us to conjure this hypothetical, but how common is it to actually see? I wonder if we wouldn’t be more shocked and affected by loving depictions of evil than we realize?

and @75 I’m curious about the moral problem that people have with treating NPCs ‘badly’… Having said that, the entire point of first-person games is that they allow the player to be a hero.

Part of being the hero is being good, being able to do great good without our actions having other consequences.

Patrick @94 They figure, if the industry reflexively gives more fanservice to men than women, that’s sexism- in the distribution, not in the fact of the fanservice itself.

Sure, but if the issue is distribution, that issue exists at the level of an individual game just much as at the level of the industry–many individual games are sexist, and that makes them inaccessible/undesirable to a lot of people for no good reason. The interesting thing about fan service though is that it’s so completely incidental to other aspects of how the character is portrayed–like, in anime, semi-pornographic ‘shots’ of a character that has mainly non-sexual interactions with the other characters. (The sexuality is in the syuzhet but not in the fabula.) That might automatically demean the character to a lot of viewers, especially given that the unbalanced distribution makes it look like something that is done to female characters to put them in their place in a male-dominated world, rather than just a way of displaying beautiful bodies.

In the first game I designed (table-top RPG) there were huge fluffy kittens near the beginning. If you hurt a kitten very bad things happened to you. This was effective in teaching players to be cautious about indiscriminate violence. But the first players then lured newbies to their doom (“go on, whack a kitten! You get loads of xp!”).

Belle,

Major props for your discussion about mental illness, and I think your words of wisdom for ZM are spot on. Much courage. Like Anita Sarkeesian.

Without combing the comments, can someone reassure me that among them is an indignant rant about tabletop gaming and the roots of NPCs?

NPCs play crucial roles in giving you quests, telling you where to go next, giving you valuable items, and anything else you can think of—in Grand theft Auto V it’s possible to have sex with prostitutes and then beat them till they give you your money back, something which inspired much free advertising protest

A gamer called Many a True Nerd has done interesting work in killing every single person possible in Fallout 3….I strongly recommend watching the video; it is hilarious, if somewhat gruesome (obviously).

I’m not a gamer, but I have the impression that GTA involves a lot of killing, so beating up prostitutes to steal from them is arguably mild by comparison. But maybe the prostitutes are damsels in distress, so their suffering is more important than that of men getting run over etc. It’s not clear to me why a killing spree can be hilarious, but a prostitute beat-down not so much. (And such reactions are likely mine as well.)

Take it back, I can safely assume that Overlord deals with moral questions, because that is what drama and narrative do. “Profound” is an aesthetic judgement.

Last night I watched a story about a vacuum cleaner’s unrequited love for a coffeemaker, who was in love with the cash register. The VC had to learn to respect her choice. Because they, coffeemaker and cash register, began to let their feelings degrade their work performance, humans tossed both into the landfill, where VC went to find and save her. But actually the appliances were partying in the landfill, and after getting overexcited combined into a giant appliance mecha that went on a rampage in the human city. Luckily the vacuum cleaner was struck by an energy bolt and leveled up to battle the fridge-mecha. He still didn’t get the girl.

Also last night, Takashi Miike’s Big Bang Love, gay prison romance. Excellent, and had some animated shots.